Cairone Family History

How My Family Came To This Country

 This was my dad’s favorite story, and he always enjoyed telling it, and he told it often. It’s about my grandfather Guiseppe, or Joseph in English.

My family’s ancestral roots have always been in the Kingdom of Sicily – on my paternal side from the small town of Cammaratta, which is about 60 km southeast of Palermo, and which like much of Sicily is a fairly mountainous and sleepy region. My grandfather Guiseppe would probably have lived his entire life there, had not the world become so unsettled that it disturbed even such a quiet village in the remote countryside. Guiseppe, born in 1888, was 26 when WW 1 erupted. Joining with other young men from the countryside, he entered the military, and although specific details are sketchy, he eventually rose to some rank of command. I don't think it was a very high rank, but he was in charge of some sort of squadron.  During a mission, his group was hit, and he sent the rest of his troops homeward while he stayed behind enemy lines with an injured comrade. Though this would also make an interesting tale, all I know is that he somehow succeeded in returning with the wounded man to safety. For this act of bravery he was given a medal, a small pension, and eventually a position in the Sicilian Secret Service or whatever they called it protecting the King of Sicily. Somewhere in there, before the war or after I don’t know, he bought or inherited some land in his hometown and married my grandmother Grace, and in 1925 they had a son. This was to be their only child, as Grace died, whether in childbirth or from other causes when my father was a toddler, I don’t know.

Now, Sicily was never a model of political and civil stability, and one day my grandfather was approached by a group of people looking to make some changes. “Guiseppe,” they said, “we know you’re a real patriot who loves the people and wants what’s best for the country. The government is bad, and we have to fix things, whatever it takes.”  So my grandfather entered into a conspiracy with these people to assassinate the king. Recall that this is Sicily, and you can imagine who these people were and what their affiliations may have been (my father, even when telling this story, always denied that the Sicilian Mafia even existed, perhaps too vehemently). Anyway, after much plotting and planning, a date for the deed was set. Then, a few hours before the coup was to begin, he had them all rounded up and arrested!

Immediately thereafter, my grandfather was summoned to an audience with the King, whom he had never so much as seen before. “Guiseppe,” said the King, “I heard about what you did. You saved my life. To show you my appreciation, I’m going to pay for you and your small son to get the hell out of Sicily while you still can!” And that’s how my family came to this country.  That’s the story as my father always told it, but that’s not the end of the story.

It was many years later, after my dad died in 1999, that I was doing some internet reading on the history of Sicily. Imagine my surprise to learn, despite all the detail in my dad’s story, that the last King of Sicily, Ferdinand II (then of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, including the Kingdom of Naples) was deposed by an invasion led by Garibaldi, which resulted in the Italian Unification of 1860. 1860! So there was no King of Sicily when my grandfather lived, nor for decades before he was even born. This discovery changed everything. Did my dad just make everything up? Was he intentionally reeling out a yarn to catch an audience?  I don’t think so – my dad wasn’t dishonest by nature.  Plus, he always seemed to believe this story himself.  I always believed him when I heard it as a kid, and in a way to this day I still believe it. It's one of those stories that even if it isn't true, it ought to be!

I suspect my dad was simply confused about certain details, and so enjoyed telling - and embellishing (a habit I must disclose I share) - this story over the years, that he began to believe it was true. That was very characteristic of my dad.  Certainly the WW1 rescue part was true – I saw the medal as a child, and I’d heard that the pension was stopped during WW2. No amount of effort could cut through the postwar Italian bureaucracy to have the pension reinstated. This was the only instance where I ever heard any negative comments about our ancestral nation. The story is very characteristic of my grandfather.  We were brought up to be proud of our cultural heritage, proud to be Italians, mostly as embodied in the personality of my grandfather, and therefore even more so prouder to be Sicilian.